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Wednesday, 28 March 2012

Daytime TV | David Hall: End Piece… | Ambika P3 | London

Text by Travis Riley

David Hall is a formative figure in time-based art. Credited
with introducing the term "time-based media" into circulation through his
writing, he followed this by creating the first British course in the subject.
In January of this year he was awarded the Samsung Art Lifetime Achievement
Award for his groundbreaking work in video art. Ambika P3 is an imposing 14,000
square foot space, hidden beneath the University of Westminster’s Engineering
School. It is the university’s former construction hall in which concrete was
tested for major projects including Spaghetti Junction and the Channel Tunnel.

An indistinct chattering pervades the area immediately
around the gallery entrance, intensifying to an echoed cacophony as you pass
through the doorway into Ambika P3’s cavernous space. The source of the clamour
becomes apparent a few steps on. The expansive warehouse floor is filled by the
1,001 face-up television sets that make up End
Piece (2012). From David Cameron, to Sue Barker, to Antiques Roadshow, the unmistakable sounds of daytime TV slowly
come into focus. Taken as a whole, the work could be seen as a depiction of a
hell worse even than Dante had imagined, however in its scale, the installation
generates an unexpected beauty.

Standing back on the raised platform above the TVs, the
images become blurred, and the noise too distorted to represent its source. The
incandescent light of the television sets washes over the space, disseminating
the harsh daytime TV as a soft glow. The flickering light seems too erratic to
be produced by a machine; the network of TVs becomes a sci-fi creation, a
cybernetic organism. The fitful cuts between Cameron and an outraged labour
backbench becomes a pattern, isolating the televisions tuned into that
particular debate, and creating an understated light show that fills the room.
A network of cables rise up from across the grid of screens. Ten metres above,
the cables come together, gathered centrally by a large hook; a point of
dispersal.

The installation is, in essence, a reworking of an earlier
piece, entitled 101 TV sets, however
in this instance Hall has imbued it with further motive. These are all cathode
ray televisions tuned into one of the five analogue channels. Consequently the
installation will chart the end of analogue broadcast in the UK. From April 4
the number of transmissions will gradually be reduced until April 18 when the
final signals will be switched off at London’s Crystal Palace. The televisions
will remain there until April 22, emitting only white noise, a steady stream of
light and sound memorialising the final signal.

Two other pieces are included in the exhibition, providing a
counterpoint in scale to the vast installation. David Hall’s TV Interruptions (1971) are widely
credited as the first instance of an artist intervention on British television.
Behind a curtain and away from the din, they are shown here as an installation
across six monitors. Films include: a television set that burns furiously, a
tap which gradually fills the screen with water, and a cameraman who films a
television set on the street, eventually filming through the screen to capture
the viewer. The themes of consumption, voyeurism, and immersion in the films
make immediate sense in the context of an unannounced broadcast. The subject
matter is further illustrated by an auditory accompaniment; a regular
announcement of “interruption” punctuated by an incessant bleeping. This along
with the haphazard positioning of the monitors, which prevents the films all
being viewed from any one position, keeps the viewer at arms length from the
events on screen.

Further still from the warblings of mass of televisions, Progressive Recession (1974) is an
installation of nine CCTV cameras mounted atop nine monitors. Only one monitor
displays its own feed, the others calculatedly resituate the viewer onto an
alternative screen. The spatial play is fun, but also disconcerting. The
cameras don’t record for security, instead enacting a form of voyeurism. Across
the length of the room, two cameras swap feeds; the viewer is constantly fed an
image from behind them. Another wall contains the remaining seven cameras. Your
own reflection is transmitted elsewhere, becoming horizontally displaced. On
the screen before you, in its place, you are left with blank space, or on
occasion, another viewer staring back at you. In this way the white room
becomes filled with a non-symmetrical surveillance loop, the network of cameras
means that a person can never just be in one place.

Whilst with TV
Interruptions and Progressive
Recession, Hall seems to have looked ahead, forecasting the themes that,
after his influence, would pervade the art world; End Piece uses current technology to look back. The installation is
concerned with the technologies and signals to which Hall responded in the
early 70s. He has taken the opportunity to demarcate a unique moment in time,
the technological transition at which analogue television will cease to exist.
Concurrently the piece locates a more personal theme, to mark the end of structures
that have defined Hall as an artist. April 18 is a moment at which many of
Hall’s pieces will become nostalgia. They can no longer be a discussion of
present formats but those, which after more than forty years of making art,
have become part of the past.

If you only read Aesthetica online, you're missing out. The February/March issue of Aesthetica is out now and offers a diverse range of features from an examination of the diversity and complexity of art produced during the tumultuous decade of the 1980s in Art, Love & Politics in the 1980s, opening 11 February at MCA Chiacgo, a photographic presentation of the Irish Museum of Modern Art's latest opening, Conversations: Photography from the Bank of America Collection. Plus, we recount the story of British design in relation to a comprehensive exhibition opening this spring at the V&A.

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Aesthetica engages with the arts both in the UK and internationally, combining dynamic content with compelling critical debate. Aesthetica is distributed in the UK in WH Smith, major galleries such as Tate Modern, ICA, and the Serpentine, as well as in 18 countries worldwide. Aesthetica is one of the leading publications for arts and culture and the editor of Aesthetica is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. The Aesthetica Blog has a broad scope; covering the latest exhibitions and cultural events from the UK and abroad.
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